Kaitlyn Finchler
Contributing Writer
With a society whose rhetoric revolves around calling poor people lazy and demanding a harsh work input from laborers, people often wonder how to solve these issues and create a better work environment.
Elizabeth Anderson, the Max Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will give her lecture “Reconsidering the Protestant Work Ethic” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy to close the Week Five Interfaith Lecture Series theme “The Spirit of Capitalism: Prosperity and the Enduring Legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic.”
“If you look at the current discourse about work and, in particular, both lamentations about Gen Z’s lack of a work ethic, as well as some members of Gen Z (criticizing) the work ethic, you can find those criticisms across all generations,” Anderson said. “It reflects a narrow perspective on what the work ethic can do for us.”
Anderson said her mission is to explain why the concept of the Protestant work ethic isn’t “just a ‘nose to the grindstone’ ideology.”
“In fact, if you look at its origins, these Puritans actually thought that the work ethic was a way to improve the status of workers,” she said. “They thought that God put us on Earth and gave us our mission in life to help each other through disciplined work — and that this was way more important than, say, the activities of monks praying in their cells, but not really doing any good for anybody else.”
The view, Anderson said, was that people who are doing “God’s work” are ordinary workers, and the goal was to uplift them. Under the Industrial Revolution, Anderson said that with the rise of capitalism, the two sides of the work ethic “split off.”
“The capitalists stressed the ‘nose to the grindstone’ aspect of the work ethic, whereas advocates for workers and the workers themselves were really insisting on their dignity,” Anderson said. “In virtue of that, if you’re really going to respect workers, you have to pay them fair wages and not subject them to unsafe working conditions.”
In her book Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers, and How Workers Can Take it Back, Anderson said she traced these two contrasting traditions through public policy and the history of economic thought.
“Those people on the capitalist side, some of them were secular, but quite a lot of them were actually preachers, Christian preachers in England,” Anderson said. “Most of them were known as dissenters. … They would be the mainline denominations of Protestantism besides Anglicans, and they tended to ally with the capitalist class.”
In response to Arkansas placing a work requirement on Medicaid eligibility a few years ago, studies have shown “pretty much everybody” was already working as hard as they could given their often deteriorated health condition, Anderson said.
“In addition, what the Arkansas experiment showed was that if you deny people healthcare, their ability to work deteriorates because they get sicker and sicker,” she said. “In fact, workplace participation declined rather than (increased) because people need good health. They need good nutrition and so forth in order to have enough energy to work.”
Further, paperwork has been a longstanding obstacle to those in need of aid, Anderson said.
“What I show in Hijacked was that this idea that you impose more and more paperwork burdens in order to kick people off welfare, that was already invented under grimmer conditions during the Irish potato famine,” she said. “The British Treasury, which was running famine relief, insisted on very extensive paperwork in order to make workers eligible for a kind of fair work.”
This is all driven by the theory of putting workers into distress and desperation because “that’s the only thing that will make them work hard,” Anderson said.
“We see that same attitude today — a very harsh attitude toward the poor — the assumption that they’re poor because they’re lazy, rather than that they’re poor because a very high percentage of jobs out there are not paying living wages,” she said.
Anderson said she wants to argue people should reconsider the harsh attitude surrounding work ethic.
“As I show in my book, it didn’t just lead to this harsh capitalist, neoliberal version of endless drudgery for low wages,” Anderson said. “It also led to, (when) it spread to the continent of Europe, to social democracy.”
